Investigating Gendered Speech Styles and Politeness Strategies by Analyzing Hedging, Directives, and Face-Management Practices in English-Medium Social Media Comment Threads among Pakistani Users through a Corpus-Assisted Sociolinguistic Approach

Abstract

The paper examines the gendered forms of speech and politeness strategies within the English-based social media comment threads among Pakistani users in terms of their corpus-based sociolinguistic methodology. The contextual basis of the research lies in the growing role of social media as a communal space that language users are negotiating the issues of identity, power, politeness, and face in very conspicuous and contentious areas. The main goal is to investigate the functionality of hedging, directives and face-management practices as gendered interactional resources in online speech. The research design is of mixed method design by combining both quantitative corpus analysis and qualitative sociopragmatic interpretation. The theoretical background relies on the interactional sociolinguistics, the modern theory of politeness and face, and gender-as-performance views. The sources of data were publicly available comment threads on Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, and YouTube in English and were collated into a dedicated corpus. The purposive and stratified sampling guaranteed the representation at the platform, topic, and interactional levels. Frequencies, collocations and concordances were produced with the help of corpus analysis instruments and interactional sequences analyzed with the help of close discourse analysis. The results indicate systematic gendered practices: female users use more hedging, polite directives and face-saving/repair strategies whereas male users make more use of directives and face-threatening actions, especially in conflictual situations. These findings indicate the politeness as a strategic resource in controlling the power, face, and gendered identity in Pakistani online communication.